


Teyshas, or, 5 Times Wyatt Logan Didn’t Apologize, and One Time He Did

by OldShrewsburyian



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Angst and Feels, Apologies, Awkward Conversations, Beer, Black Male Character, Bunker Feels, But also, Canon Character of Color, Canon Compliant, Canon Lesbian Character, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s02e10 Chinatown, Feelings, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Injury, James Bond References, Knitting, Male Friendship, Male-Female Friendship, Mentions of Racism, POV Third Person Limited, POV Wyatt Logan, Physics, Post-Season/Series 02, Swearing, Tea, Team Dynamics, Team as Family, You Have Been Warned, emphasis on, surprising no one, toxic masculinity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-22 22:03:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16606277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: This work takes place in the aftermath of the s2 finale, with the bunker team/family still grieving Rufus' loss. I've wanted to write something from Wyatt's POV for some time now, so this is me doing that. I'm sure the team will #SaveRufus, but there's no hint of how/when they get to do that here. This is just an exploration of Wyatt Logan's feelings and relationships to his team members. Apply shipping goggles as desired.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Teyshas is a Caddo language word for friends/allies. From this word both the name and the state motto of Texas are taken. (Do I have feelings about history and language about this? You bet.)

Rufus, Wyatt is convinced, was the best of them. That’s the sort of thing you say at a guy’s funeral, of course: comfort the grieving relatives. Assure the wife, the parents, the girlfriend that their husband, son, boyfriend was still good, was still kind, was unlike the stone-faced men and women in uniform gathered at the funeral, an alien presence to civilians in off-the-hanger black clothes. But still. Rufus. Rufus had always been more than a cliché. He had even seemed like the kind of guy clichés couldn’t hurt. And he’d been family.

Wyatt surprises himself with the thought. He hadn’t earned being Rufus’ family. (He’s sure the Army psychiatrist would have something to say about families and earning places in them, or not, but oh well.) He’s not sure he could face the family Rufus did have: the mom who adored him, the kid brother who played basketball and talked back to him and didn’t know how lucky he was. He’s relieved he won’t have to face another funeral where he is the survivor, the one who couldn’t save the life lost. 

They’d pulled the team back together more than once, the three of them. They’d raged and deceived each other and clawed their way back to a united front because the alternative was always worse. Wyatt still finds himself wondering why Rufus apparently adopted him, treated him with the mixture of tolerance and irritation reserved for siblings, for people you knew you couldn’t get rid of, and wouldn’t want to. “White, Texan, Army” had to carry a default setting of “avoid” or at least “proceed with caution.” Rufus was smart; Rufus was no lover of danger. But Rufus was the best of them. He thinks about Rufus’ blood slipping over his fingers, and shivers. Rufus had saved his sorry ass more than once. He’d kept him from getting kicked off mission; had helped him break the laws of time and history and the goddamn US government; had saved his life from a psycho white supremacist clockmaker and a seriously intimidating Shawnee chieftain. Regarding the latter, Wyatt is sure he had it coming, in a karma-of-history sense. But Rufus… Rufus was the best of them.

Sure, they’d saved each other’s lives a couple of times. But for Wyatt, saving a teammate’s life could be any day on the job; you just hoped it wasn’t, and knew it was better than the alternative. And he knows better than most that no law of human says you have to _like_ the guy who keeps you from bleeding out. But here they are. Were, because he couldn’t save Rufus that last time. And he’s not even sure that he thanked Rufus properly. No, strike that: he knows he didn’t. But how would he even start? _Thanks for piloting us into a super-racist past over and over again, and hardly ever mentioning the ways white people haven’t changed?_ There’s that. _Thanks for never holding your MIT degree over me. Thanks for being brave enough to admit you were scared. Thanks for telling me to get over myself. Thanks for telling me to talk about my feelings._

“Still working on that one,” says Wyatt aloud. He’d always sworn he’d never be one of the soldiers who talked to their dead. But here he is, alone in a partitioned room of a nuclear bunker: who’s to know? “I miss your terrible jokes,” says Wyatt aloud. There is no echo of an imagined answer in the silence. “God, Rufus. If I have to grow that stupid beard to save your life, it’ll be worth it.”


	2. Denise + Connor

Had anyone asked him, as a hypothetical question, whether it was possible to knit grimly, Wyatt Logan would have said no.

He now knows that he would have been wrong. He honestly doesn’t know if Agent Christopher expects an apology or a confession or hara-kiri. He just knows that he’s in very, very deep trouble. Wyatt takes a deep breath. “If you want my resignation…”

“Don’t be an idiot, Sergeant.”

That silences him for several moments. The wool between her hands is pale blue. “Ma’am?”

“You heard me.” Denise Christopher counts stitches under your breath. “If you’re offering to compensate for endangering the security of the team by walking out, leaving us down one soldier — two, at the moment — and leaving yourself on the outside as a liability and a target, then I have to say that that is one of the more ridiculous ideas I have heard in my time.” Wyatt opens his mouth, and closes it again. “And,” adds Agent Christopher, “I was in the NYPD in the 1980s.”

“Offer withdrawn, ma’am.”

She smiles at her knitting. When she speaks again, it is in a softer tone. “I don’t believe you ever made me an offer, Sergeant Logan.”

He takes another uneven breath. “Well. It’s… good of you to see it like that.” He knows it’s his fault that she’s sitting here, waiting for the word from the powers-that-be about where they’re going next. He’s still not sure that he could have acted differently. Should have? Oh, sure — he can imagine a world full of choices he should have made. But could he have made himself speak? Made himself walk up to Agent Christopher and say that he suspected his wife — his _wife_ — of being an agent, a mole?

“I needed her to know that I trusted her.” He chokes it out, and it sounds far more like a plea, far more like an excuse than it should. He knows that standing in front of the woman who is in effect his commanding officer should feel more like a court martial. But he cannot think how to testify in his own defense. Standing officially at ease, listening to the gentle click of her knitting needles, he can barely hear anything other than the litany of his own losses. He had lost Jess long ago. He had lost her to Rittenhouse, he had lost her to his own damfool pride, and then he had lost everything else because he was unable to see it.

“I’m not going to absolve you, Wyatt,” says Agent Christopher softly. “Nor,” she adds, a little wryly, “am I going to read you the riot act. But I will say this: give your trust to those who have earned it.”

“Ma’am.”

“Your team deserves that,” she says. “And they deserve to know they can trust you.”

“Yes ma’am,” says Wyatt. “I — thank you.”

A smile quirks at the side of her mouth. “Dismissed, Sergeant Logan.”

***

Not even Army training could make Wyatt Logan a morning person. But he hasn’t been sleeping well; and finally, after checking the plastic analog clock once too often, he gives it up and pads sullenly out to the common area.

He wasn’t expecting to find anyone else there. “Oh,” says Wyatt. “Uh. Hi.” He isn’t sure that he’d be any more articulate with Mason if it _were_ a time of day better suited to human speech.

“Good morning, Sergeant.”

Wyatt hovers, and is conscious of doing so. It would feel rude to turn his back and dig through the communal pile of paperbacks, as if Mason’s presence didn’t matter. But he has no idea what to say to the guy.

“Tea?”

Wyatt half-laughs. “Sure.” He pulls out a mug, sits down opposite the older man, who is, even at this hour, immaculately clad, albeit in pajamas, slippers, and dressing gown. It is definitely, decides Wyatt, a dressing gown and not a bathrobe. 

He sips, tries not to make a face. “It’s good.”

Amusement pulls at Mason’s lips. “Finest Assam, Sergeant.”

“Yeah,” says Wyatt, and sips again. “Where I come from, it’s usually Lipton.”

“And adulterated with disgusting quantities of sugar, no doubt.”

“You got it.” They sit over their cups in silence for a little while, and Wyatt thinks that this might be one of the advantages of tea: it’s less insistent than coffee that you ought to be _doing_ something with your morning.

“Look,” says Wyatt, “I know it wasn’t supposed to be this way.” Mason looks up to meet his eyes, and he is less sure than ever that he wants to be doing this. But Rufus had said he should talk about how he felt, right? “I know it’s my job to get the team home safe. The soldiers’ job. But I — we — tried. And I know that’s not good enough, and I know you’ve known Rufus for, like, a decade…”

“Twelve years,” says Mason softly. 

Wyatt swallows. “Yeah.” He sighs, and the silence presses on them. “I don’t even know what I’m trying to say.”

“Perhaps,” suggests Mason quietly, refilling their cups, “that you miss him too?”

“Yeah,” says Wyatt again. “Before I met Rufus, I would never have thought that a genius could be _nice._. No offense.”

“None taken.” Mason contemplates his tea. “He had a rare goodness, Rufus.”

“He did. Does, I guess. Or will.”

“Do you want to pick a verb tense, Sergeant?”

“Hell no; you’re the one who knows how time travel works. But we will get him back,” says Wyatt. “And that’s a promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The conviction that Wyatt is not a morning person is, I think, owed to @madsthenerdygirl.


	3. Jiya

He goes in search of Jiya. They’ve all taken turns making sure she eats. He’s made her cornbread and skillet toast and chicken three ways, but they haven’t really… talked. He finds her, unsurprisingly, in the Lifeboat. She’s sitting in the pilot’s seat, a clipboard with a sheaf of calculations in her hands.

“We’re always outrunning our own energy,” she says suddenly.

“Uh, yeah,” says Wyatt. “Hey.”

“Hey.” She scribbles a note in the margin of her paper. “Do you have _any_ idea what special relativity is?”

He takes a second to review 11th-grade physics, just in case. “No.” He doesn’t think he’s imagining the anger emanating from her. “I, uh, came to see if you needed any unskilled labor.” 

Jiya huffs out a breath. “What, you thought holding a wrench would help?”

Wyatt shrugs, hands in pockets. “I can do more than hold a wrench. Show me what needs to be optimized, and I’ll do it. Show me what bits let us put on the brakes or take a tight corner… I know engines.”

Jiya thrusts the clipboard at him. “Read out these equations for me.” 

Well, he’d offered unskilled labor. So he recites obediently, stumbling over their unfamiliar cadences. 

The first time he says “Echo,” Jiya twists around, squints at the sheet — how the hell she finds her place so quickly is a mystery to him — and says “Epsilon.” Otherwise she works in silence. He waits at the end of every sequence, but she keeps going; he is more than half-hoarse by the time they’re through the sheaf of papers.

“Thanks,” Jiya says softly.

“Don’t mention it.”

She swallows visibly, not looking at him. “Special relativity,” she says, almost in a whisper, “is one of Einstein’s theories. It explains how — how space and time are linked.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But the thing is,” continues Jiya, her breath hitching, “that it only works for objects moving through time _together_ , moving through time in the same direction, at the same speed. Of course, before Connor, that wasn’t — wasn’t a problem.”

“But…” says Wyatt, and then he sees it. There’s no guarantee of finding Rufus at the same age they left him; no guarantee of how time will affect Jiya while they continue to fight Rittenhouse through space-time. “Oh.”

“Why did you come back?” She is crying, and it sounds like a plea. “I told you not to come back for me. I told _him_ not to come back for me.”

“He…” begins Wyatt, and stops.

Jiya swivels the pilot’s chair to face him. “Say it.”

Wyatt swallows. “He couldn’t live without you.” Jiya — Jiya who survived working in a San Francisco bar in the 1880s to work on physics no one else understands — sobs. And to his utter shock, she half-throws herself into his arms.

“Hey,” says Wyatt. He reflects sadly that he has always been terrible at this. “Hey, hey.” For Jiya, and for Rufus, he can at least try. “You’ll get through this,” he says, and his throat is tight around the cliché that is also a truth. “I promise.” He moves the clipboard, settles himself and them more comfortably on the Lifeboat floor. 

He’d be more relieved about her not trying to apologize if she weren’t crying so hard. Jiya, her fists clutching his shirt, cries like a child who can’t imagine a broken thing ever being fixed, who can’t imagine the wrongness of their world ever being righted. And then, her sobs slowing, softening, she falls asleep. Wyatt shifts so that his back is braced against his seat. Very gently, he moves Jiya’s hair away from her face. For her, he thinks, it should be a miracle without a sting. For her, getting Rufus back should be pure joy. He doesn’t believe in the God of clapboard and adobe churches. He doesn’t believe in some higher power, manipulating fate in the interests of good people. But she and Rufus deserve this. _And isn’t that ironic,_ he thinks, _to suddenly feel as though ‘deserving’ should matter._ He’s seen too much war to believe that. But for Jiya and Rufus…

“Hey, Albert Einstein,” whispers Wyatt, “what about pulling some of those cosmic strings?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The book on time travel reviewed here is quite interesting:  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-395-95563-5.
> 
> I also relied on this:  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/according-to-current-phys/
> 
> Cosmic string theory was not introduced till the 1970s, well after Einstein’s death, and of course his own cosmology did not allow for the afterlife, but Wyatt’s departures from habitual pragmatism are notable for their creativity.
> 
> Despite having translated the letters of interwar physicists, I have only the understanding of an Educated Layperson™ on this subject, and welcome corrections, with apologies for errors.


	4. Flynn

He’d only wanted a beer. But he finds Garcia Flynn in the kitchen, fiddling one-handed with the top of a pill bottle. Wyatt debates, briefly, offering to open it for him. Or just doing it — taking it out of his hands and twisting the cap off ( _the way he’d done with jars for Jess,_ supplies his traitorous memory.) Wyatt tells himself firmly that he has _some_ sense of self-preservation, and instead reaches down a glass, fills it at the sink. Flynn has rather ostentatiously ignored him, but when he turns from picking out two pills from the spill across the counter, Wyatt is holding out the glass.

This overture is greeted with a half-smirk and a cocked eyebrow. “Thank you?”

“You’re welcome.” _Damn it._ “That isn’t what I…” Wyatt swallows. “You look like hell.”

“Thank you.” 

Again Wyatt swears internally. “Look, I’ve always said that in a fight, you’re only as good as the man next to you.”

Flynn sets the drained glass down on the counter. “Any more pearls of wisdom, Logan? Because if not…”

“I know you were aiming at her gun hand.” He blurts it out in a rush; he can feel his face coloring.

Flynn blinks. He looks, unsurprisingly, as though he’s trying to focus through a haze the pills can as yet have done nothing for; but even under the circumstances, Wyatt finds, it is gratifying to put the other man at a loss for words. “I know,” Wyatt says more slowly, “that you were aiming at Jess’ gun hand. Back there,” he adds, “in the saloon. I know you were on our side.” God, he should have thought this through better.

“On _our_ side,” he repeats, “not just your own, or not just Lucy’s…” Okay, that is another avenue he doesn’t want to explore. “I know you had my back,” he says simply.

Flynn makes no reply. He doesn’t nod in acknowledgement; he doesn’t even move. Wyatt finds himself waiting for the comeback line, the quip about Wyatt being better with bullets than with words, or about _someone_ needing to look out for Jess, or… 

“I’m sorry about Rufus,” says Flynn.

Very slowly, Wyatt expels a breath. “Yeah,” he says roughly. “Yeah.”

“And about Jessica, for whatever that’s worth.”

“Look, that’s not — ” But Wyatt had allowed it to become Flynn’s business, had bargained with him for the knowledge that he hoped could keep her safe, had let her past what were now their shared defenses…. Wyatt inhales. “I’m not asking for your damn _sympathy._ ”

Flynn’s expression flickers slightly, but it does not settle into anything sardonic or, worse, pitying. 

“I’ll — I’ll just get my beer.” When he turns around from the fridge, the other man is still standing there, watching him. For the second time in the conversation, Wyatt forces himself to speak quickly, without second-guessing himself. “Do you think there’s a chance of getting her back?” He’s not even sure what kind of an answer he’s hoping for: to be told to move on, or to be told not to; or even just to be sniped at, so that he can go back to resenting Flynn’s presence and restore _some_ sort of order to the version of reality they’re living in.

Flynn sighs. He half-turns away, replaces the pills in the medicine bottle. When he has gotten the cap back on, he says: “I gave up that kind of hope some time ago. Doesn’t mean you should.”

 _Well, what were you expecting?_ Wyatt asks himself. _A positivity mantra?_ “Yeah,” he says aloud. “Thanks. I’ll come to you the next time I need unhelpful non-advice.” 

And at that, Flynn grins. “Any time.”

Wyatt salutes him semi-ironically with the beer bottle. Later, nursing the beer and a Tom Clancy novel on the couch, he finds himself wondering (again, still) about Flynn’s terrifyingly calculated decision to spare the life of a woman who had betrayed them. He wonders if he dares ask Flynn why he did it. He thinks about Flynn grinning at him past a three-day beard and a gunshot wound, and wonders if he might be actually getting to _like_ the guy. He decides that’s a question for the second beer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let Flynn And Wyatt Be Friends 2k18. Seriously, this is one of the main things I want from the Christmas special.


	5. Lucy

The bunker is usually quiet when he emerges from his evening shower. By unspoken consensus, they have been retiring early since the Chinatown mission: Jiya to her memories and her visions; Connor to his whisky and his records; Lucy to her books and Flynn, Wyatt presumes, to whatever rest he can get. So it is with some surprise that, toweling his hair, he recognizes the James Bond theme coming from the common room.

It is Lucy whom he finds, her face pale and solemn in the reflection of the saturated colors of the ’60s. He takes his time going over; if she frowns on seeing him, he can always just get a glass of water and retreat to his bedroom. He’s at the couch before she looks up, and her face brightens, but only briefly. He doesn’t think he’s imagining that her lip trembles a little as she turns back to the screen. An unpleasant conviction settles in his stomach: she was expecting — hoping — to see someone else. And Bond films don’t seem like Jiya’s kind of thing… not that they seem much like Lucy’s either. Mind you, there is Sean Connery, with the kind of suavity that Wyatt always feels he’s badly roleplaying when they’re sent to the mid-twentieth century.

“You like them better since becoming a Bond girl?”

She smiles, but sadly, and she does not look at him. “No, Wyatt.” Okay. Stupid thing to say. They watch in silence for a while.

“I always forget how racist these old ones are,” he remarks.

This time, her smile is more genuine. “Sexist, too. The thing is,” says Lucy, hugging her knees to her chest, “I know those things are real. It’s just… sometimes nice to pretend they’re as much of a fantasy as lethal bowler hats, or whatever Q’s latest invention is.”

“Yeah,” says Wyatt. “I get that. What _is_ it with that bowler hat, by the way? Some kind of complex 1960s joke we’re missing?” 

“Probably.” She glances sideways at him. “I’m a historian, not a trivia fiend.”

He holds up his hands in mock-surrender. “Got it.”

“Nothing stops James Bond,” says Lucy. He wishes she didn’t sound quite so wistful. “Not Fort Knox, not nuclear bombs… certainly not teams of henchmen out to destroy him.”

“Must be nice.”

“Exactly!” She tucks her legs beneath her, and there it is — the excitement he’s so missed hearing in her voice. “Especially now that we’re fighting evil masterminds of our own… it’s nice to have that fantasy. That there’s always a happy ending, somehow. That the good guy always wins.”

“We’ll get there,” says Wyatt. He’s glad that he sounds more confident than he feels. “We’ll get Rufus back, get his genius brain back on our side. You can history our way into Emma’s top secret lair — maybe she’s using an old Bond set! Flynn and I will take her out in a blaze of glory.”

She looks a little as though she’s trying not to laugh at him, and oh god, he’ll take it, he’ll take it, if only she’ll keep smiling.

“I tried to do that,” says Lucy softly.

Wyatt frowns. “To… take Emma out in a blaze of glory?” It seems wildly implausible, but he can’t figure out what else she could be talking about.

“I would have settled for taking her out.” 

“…Oh.” He hadn’t asked. He hadn’t really taken time to think about it, hadn’t thought about much of anything beyond the need to get them all out of there and the unspeakable, overwhelming relief of having her back. “Flynn didn’t… he didn’t try to stop you, did he?”

Lucy shakes her head. “No. No, he stopped her. Stopped Emma from…” She breaks off, and Wyatt sure as hell isn’t going to press her. “I couldn’t even get a shot off straight.”

“Oh, Luce.” She still looks so fragile to him, still-healing bruises lurid in the light from the television screen. “Lucy, don’t cry.” He reaches out to touch her shoulder, but she flinches away. “I’ll teach you,” he offers impulsively, and the next second wonders what he’s thinking. Where are they going to find a shooting range? Can they do it with tin cans in the woods, old school? Is he going to teach Lucy how to shoot using video games? Does he even want her to know that — to have to know how to calculate for your enemy’s movement and the kick of the gun and your own trembling?

“I’m sorry, Lucy.” 

She sniffles audibly, her breath catching, but she looks directly at him. “For what?”

Wyatt hesitates a moment. “…Everything?”

That gets him a watery laugh. “Wyatt.”

“No, I mean it. For being an idiot. For not thinking more about how you were feeling. For not thinking, full stop.” She laughs again, unsteadily, and some of the tension goes out of her shoulders and out of the air between them. 

“I’m not going to apologize for how I feel about you, Luce.” He watches her breath quicken a little. She is so extraordinary, and he probably hasn’t told her enough; he should have told her over and over again, just because. “But I am going to apologize for having crap timing.”

Lucy smiles. He wishes she still didn’t look so sad, as well as exhausted. “Apology accepted.” She shifts over, leans her head against his shoulder. “Now shut up and watch the movie.”

Relief blooms warm as hope in his chest. “Yes, ma’am,” says Wyatt, and is rewarded with her elbow in his ribs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are... a lot of layers to Wyatt's attitude here, and I don't think all of them are healthy. But he's trying.
> 
> On another note, if anyone does know what the deal with Oddjob's hat is, let me know?


End file.
